Don’t blame him for this. Like the financial mess, he inherited this from Bush.
Hello. I’m a bleeding heart left-wing liberal environmentalist, and the fuckers blow out on me all the time.
I’m a conservative, and I had two CFLs die after nine years of use. The other 9 in the apartment are still going strong.
You’ll have to save your outrage for traffic or something. They work fine in normal light sockets. I’ve been using them since the late 90’s. The only trouble I’ve seen is they don’t like the cold.
Yes, I point and laugh at you, personally.
I simply don’t see this behavior - I use CFLs in all our closets, and they all come up to full brightness instantly - maybe you should buy better CFLs.
Too expensive and not a direct replacement for most incandescent lightbulbs. I’m looking forward to the day though.
They do, however, make the greatest flashlights. I have quite a collection of them.
Unless you have an electronic switch turning the light off there shouldn’t be any residual voltage feeding the light. This you could check (carefully) with a volt meter. The other possibility is a high voltage field from an appliance very near the light. An example of this can be seen in this videowith a fluorescent tube under a high voltage power line.
Actually this law IS an example of the market at work, the industry/lobbyist/Congress market. Rather than an idea that is being forced upon us by the green-left, this law was encouraged by lobbyists from Phillips and GE, under the pretex of being ‘good for the planet’. The manufacturers helped get the law passed.
It is going to be REAL good for the bulb manufacturers. There are 40 BILLION standard light bulb sockets in the US alone. We are now being encouraged and later will be required to discard our .50 cent bulb and replace it with a $4.00 CFL.
You do the math on that and you will begin to understand why there was not a peep of complaint about this mandate from the manufacturers. The bulb makers will go all Microsoft on us about 5 years after everyone has CFLs in place and push for an upgrade to LED’s.
For the good of the planet, you know.
As for me, I hate the CFLs because I can hear them whine and it is very annoying.
Also, if they’re going to ban incandescents, (that is a tedious word to type out) why keep using CFLs that are designed to fit in regular sockets? It’s wasteful to be throwing out the ballasts over and over again. It would be better to buy one ballast and then buy replacement tubes, just like with regular fluorescents.
While you may have lights that turn on quickly it is the nature of such lights to take time to fully brighten. Are you using 60, 75 or 100 watt equivalent?
In my bedroom I have 2 lamps, one with (3) 60 watt bulbs (hanging) and one with (2) 60 watt bulbs (torch style). I can get by with using the 3 bulb light but prefer both lights when reading.
One thing I’ve noticed in comparison claims on packages is a difference in lumens in a given range of wattage use. In many different ways, CFL’s are not all created equal.
They are the least expensive option actually. Initial investment is a bit spendy but then you don’t change a lightbulb for more than ten years and the cost difference that you save in electricity pays off by year one. They are also expensive because they don’t have the economy of scale. If more people bought them they’d produce more and there would be more competition and the price would go down.
Yep.
These look promising. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/led_bulb_replac.php
They are 308 lumens which they say will replace a 70 watt bulb but from what I am reading 70 watt incandescent is around 1000 lumens. So maybe not.
While $ 70 IS expensive, if you thin about not having to replace the incandescent for the next ten years, it actually pays for itself in the long run, particularly since you can get more lumens per watt from an LED than an incandescent.
And unlike flourescents LEDs are dimmable.
People aren’t buying them because they suck in most situations. The best use I’ve seen so far are the candelabra lights. I haven’t seen one (in a store) that I would buy and I’m constantly looking for them. The only store to carry them so far has been Sams Warehouse and they are sold next to the underwritten CFL’s (8 for $1.83).
There may be an LED replacement for general lighting but they aren’t in stores yet.
This may be why people are bitching so much about CFL’s and it won’t help LED’s to continue on the same track. If I paid $60 for a replacment for a 70 watt bulb and it’s giving me 30% of the light then basically I need 3 of these bulbs to be happy. Now I’m up to $180 dollars for a freaking light.
I put a 20 watt CFL in my hallway light as a replacement for a 70 watt. It was purchased specifically because it was billed as an instant on/compact bulb of 70 watt comparable luminense. It instantly turns on to 40 watts worth of light and slowly builds to a 60 watt incandescence worth of light. NOT HAPPY. I don’t think I can get a bigger bulb in it because the jackasses who designed the fixture put the base in the middle so the bulb touches the edge. I only use the hall light for brief periods so it’s never bright enough to make me happy. I may go back to a traditional bulb or take the fixture apart and move the base over so it’s more useful. rrrrrrrrr
It’s not like people don’t want to save money by upgrading.
Started outfitting the house with CFLs as the regular bulbs went out about two years ago. We were replacing the bathroom bulb about every 6 months.
So far, never had to replace a single CFL for any reason whatsoever.
Huh. News to me.
What about dimmer switches. They don’t seem to work on those. I have 8 ceiling can lights that I use on dimmers all the time.
My dining room is lit with a candelabra on a dimmer switch, and I haven’t had any luck finding CFL bulbs for it. I also have two other I also have two other lights that use candelabra bulbs, but they aren’t on dimmers so I can use candelabra CFL bulbs in them.
There is nothing special about the can lights I’m talking about. I just use regular old 60w bulbs in them.
If you replace them with the CFLs the dimmer does not work. Well, It will dim a little, but then just goes out. I believe that the CFLs must have a certain amount of power. They won’t work on a ‘trickle’.
There’s a CFL in our old house in England which I put in the stairway landing socket in 1995 - required a ladder and much wobbly climbing, because the socket is 15 feet above ground.
It was still in there and still working when I visited the old lady who bought the house last year.